This disclosure relates to computer testing systems utilizing test data and, more particularly, to techniques for automatically generating test data.
Test data (also referred to as character string data for test) is used instead of live data in a variety of test operations, such as testing whether a system is operating normally or whether the system can be resistant to a load. While live customer data could be used as test data, created test data is preferred to prevent leakage of customer data. Test data can also be linked to computer units, modules or subsystems in system development. For example, test data may be used for an entire system test, or for a stress test on whether a specific web application is resistant to a particular actual operation, and so forth.
Various conventional methods have been known. In the conventional art, a specific character string may be added to live data to create test data. For instance, the data may be in the form “test_XXXXX” (which may be an alphabetic or pictorial character data) where a specific character string “test_” is added to live data “XXXXX”. Alternatively, the same character string may be used at all positions to acquire test data. In this case, the data may be in the form “XXXXX” where all of the data is created for test purposes. Irregular character strings may also be randomly generated to create the test data. The data may be, for instance, “fkwLkxP”. As another option, pictorial characters or character strings selected from a lookup table may also serve as test data. For instance, the data may include pictorial characters, such as , , and .